Ellen White Rook on “Sparrows Fall”

My mother was a storyteller. She spoke with passion and paid attention to detail so that as I listened, I felt her experience viscerally. She grew up in a Connecticut factory town during the depression. Although she lived in an industrial neighborhood, her parents raised chickens and grew their own vegetables. Many of her friends She could only afford dyed orange margarine and sugar sandwiches on white bread for lunch for lunch. Dust bowl hobos marked their back gate as her mother always gave these men something. My mother shared how heartbroken she felt reading The Grapes of Wrathand watch the film. The way she taught me to cook, sew, clean transmitted what it was to live in a time of hardship.

About 15 years ago, at the Orlando airport on my way home from visiting her in Florida, I decided to pick up a nonfiction book rather than my typical airport police procedural choice. Because her stories of the devastating dust bowl had so touched her and then me, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time caught my eye on a shelf of new releases. I found Egan’s story of greed, arrogance and the agricultural misuse which resulted compelling. I had previously flown across the country and had been struck by the relentless miles of cultivated land. Ten years before, I had walked through a plot of prairie grass at the Chicago Botanical Gardens[1] and had an inkling of what our country was like when the people who lived her loved and cared for the earth. When I arrived home, I called my mother to ask her if she had remembered when dust storms blackened skies of her hometown as well as the rest of the northeast, but she had no recollection. I was struck by the absence of witness, which seemed as powerful as the act of witnessing.

The misery and suffering of the dust bowl has stayed with me since. I have lent and given away the book numerous times and frequently recommended it, although I’m not sure any of my friends or family has gone on to read it.  “Dust” is one of the most recurrent words in my poetry, and each time I have used the word, it carries a tiny subtext of the dust bowl. When the sky is veiled by pollen shook from pines in springtime and or recent summers when fine ash from wildfires make their way across the country to cook the sun red, I have revisited the feelings of rawness, tenderness, horror, grief, anguish, and anger that were awakened by The Worst Hard Time.

However, it had never occurred to me to write about the dust bowl. I usually write about smaller and more personal things, but I try to respect inspiration, by writing down whatever fragments arise, and it was a personal angle that brought me into this poem: “I asked my mother if she remembered / dust covering the sun. “In revision, I decided I wanted to keep the poem personal but take the mother/daughter relation out of the poem as it might be distracting to the reader and take the focus away from the substance. The recollection of sparrows falling to the earth also arose in the initial fragment. The original line was “sparrows fell,” but it detoured through “sparrows grounded” before arriving in the present tense and becoming the title. I am not a Christian, but I was familiar with Mathew 10:29 and thought it would have resonance for some readers: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” It was also a disaster of biblical proportions.

There were few facts in the first draft of the poem, but I felt they would be helpful to the reader to understand and feel the enormity of the devastation, so I went back to The Worst Hard Time and also consulted the Connecticut newspapers and, of course, Wikipedia.

While I was writing the poem, I wasn’t sure if it was a prose poem or a verse poem. The first draft looks like a typical contemporary poem with irregular line breaks, but the narrative voice felt like sentences in sequence. I tried to let the anguish and anger I felt shape the line length and the sound choices.

In the original draft of the poem, I also explored the idea of what I personally failed to witness as a child: “the neighbor’s miscarriage . . . my uncles spine consumed by cancer.” I decided that “Sparrows Fall” leaves space for the reader to ask themselves that question. What have I missed? This material may be a start for another poem.

What I discovered writing this poem is that even when we fail to witness, through curiosity and respect for our passion to know and understand, we maintain the ability to see clearly and gain wisdom. With words, image, the musicality of language, even the white space on the page, poets create objects that transmit and evoke experience as my mother did with her stories. Poetry is a way into the world. I was struck by how slow this poem was to take form—perhaps sixty years, with the driving impetus occurring at least fifteen years ago. I’ve found that when we respect what we are curious and passionate about, a poem will come with its own voice, image, and form when it is time. There is so much we need to remember to create a better life for everyone, and as poets, we have so much to give.

[1] Chicago Botanical Gardens now has a fifteen-acre prairie site: Dixon Prairie.